Try it for free for 2 weeks. Subscribe if you love it.
Institute of Global Health Innovation
Pricing Manifesto
We don’t accept that. We want work to be a great source of meaning and fulfillment in our lives. This is important to us because work takes up more of our lives than just about anything else.
We think this should be possible for most kinds of work (the exception being work you feel is inherently evil or harmful to the world).
Digital products that don't charge money, or don't charge enough, end up selling customer data or shutting down. Neither of those outcomes is acceptable to us.
When a users pays a significant amount for Sunsama, they are sending a strong signal that we've created something of significant value for them. This signal drives our product development process. We build and improve Sunsama for our paying customers, first and foremost.
On the other hand, users on a free forever plan can be the most fickle while getting the least value from the product. Their requests can dilute a product which ultimately hurts the people who use it the most.
We've seen too many productivity products fail because they fail to make money even though they grew their free user base fast. We think building a business that grows quickly, in hopes of future salvation from venture capitalist or an acquisition creates bad incentives for us and a sub-par product for our customers.
We know that more people would convert to a paid plan if we'd price the product at $19.99 instead of $20.00 but that's just deceitful psychological trickery. Just like our core product, we're interested in building a product that fights back against our psychological weaknesses instead of taking advantage of them.
If we sold Sunsama as a "lifetime deal", we'd have no incentive to improve the product, or even make it very good. Our only incentive would be to convince people to buy it and move on. We only want to make our money from people who love using the product everyday.
Long term committed customers enable us to sink our teeth into improving the product in meaningful ways instead of chasing new marketing fads. Our annual plan is our way of thanking you for that.
It's wrong to build to a business off of people's forgetfulness. You should give us your money only after you've fallen in love with Sunsama as your daily planner.
We think our product provides the same value the whole year round and that customers should not be penalized (or rewarded) because of when they found out about Sunsama and decided to pay.